3 album covers in our archive
Nirvana is featured in Behind the Covers' archive with 3 album covers from the 1990s. Released across DGC Records, the artwork sits in the alternative, rock tradition. Each cover is documented in our archive with design notes covering photography, band photo, typographic, logo, anatomical, medical. Below you'll find the full story behind each Nirvana cover — designers, photographers, label history, and the visual choices that defined the release.
Cover evolution
When MTV's producer looked at Kurt Cobain's set requests and asked 'You mean like a funeral?', Cobain answered 'Exactly. Like a funeral.' Seven months later he was dead, and the lilies and black candles on this cover stopped looking like staging and started looking like prophecy.
Nirvana's final studio album features anatomical collages by artist Robert Fisher that Walmart and Kmart refused to stock, forcing the band to create sanitized alternate covers for major retailers while the original became a statement of artistic integrity.
A four-month-old baby swims naked toward a dollar bill on a fishhook — and decades later that baby would sue the band. The story behind Nirvana's 1991 cover runs from a TV program on water births to a censorship fight Kurt Cobain won with a single outrageous sentence.
